Thursday, 26 April 2012

If anyone would like to know why the Vatican is investigating American religious sisters, and wonders whether it is being a bit heavy-handed, they might care to read what some sisters say about it themselves. If you have the stomach, you can read the whole thing here.

"This latest mandate to reform the LCWR—indeed to put it out of business—has been in the works for years. In a process that began in 2008, the “doctrinal assessment,” as it is known, was aimed at investigating the “serious doctrinal problems which affect many in Consecrated Life.” In the face of wars in several parts of the world, ecological crises throughout the planet, and severe economic injustice, it is morally embarrassing that the Vatican chooses to spend its time on such trivia. But given that the result is aimed at some of the very people whose lives are dedicated to peace making, Earth enhancement, and economic sharing, it is worth clarifying what is at stake.

The crux of the matter, as it were, is that most of the nuns, like many Catholics, have matured beyond the Vatican’s imaginings. The notion that postmodern Catholics assent to “the doctrine of the faith that has been revealed by God in Jesus Christ, presented in written form in the divinely inspired Scriptures, and handed on in the Apostolic Tradition under the guidance of the Church’s Magisterium,” (or, simply, the fathers know best) is simply ludicrous."

The author is one [Sister] Mary Hunt, and it must now be clear that she is not just a post-Modern, but a post-Christian.

The key to this crisis arose because of the demand of Vatican II for religious orders to return to the charism of their founders in order to serve the Church in the modern world. This created a mentality thatregarded what had intervened was distorted and valueless. It did not take long, mainly under the influence of the Jesuits, for secularism to take over.

Coming to the present, these policies have led to a serious decline in the Orders. They are predominently elderly relics of what they were. The reason, I believe, why these dissident nuns do not become laicised or Episcopalians is because they would abandon a secure and comfortable life made possible by the capital and buildings inherited from the past which enables them to live as prosperous spinsters. They know they have no future nor any attraction for young women to enter the religious life. Effectively this enables them to put up two fingers to the Church.

I once met an American Ursuline who bought clothes at expensive shops,worked in secular jobs, had her own flat and car and then took up ecology which enabled her to travel all over the world to attend conferences. She was in clover. Then there was another whose apostolate was working in the lingerie department of a New York store. One assumes that the latter did not wear a habit.

Anonymous, I'd be interested to hear you expand on your comment that the Jesuits had a hand in secularism taking over. Other than Malachi Martin's book, I don't know a great deal about the history of this order, but I should declare an interest - my sons were educated at a leading Jesuit school ( St Aloysius College, Sydney), and emerged, like so many of their cohort, as true "men for others".

This has been long overdue. I have read some of the addresses given at their conferences and they are hair-raising. I would also contest the affirmation that the LCWR represents “the majority of nuns in the US”. The number of Orders represented by the LCWR may be the majority, but that doesn’t mean the majority of sisters in those Orders subscribe to what their ‘management’ espouses.

Perhaps a more accurate description would be that the LCWR represents “the majority of nuns of a certain age”.

This has been long overdue. I have read some of the addresses given at their conferences and they are hair-raising. I would also contest the affirmation that the LCWR represents “the majority of nuns in the US”. The number of Orders represented by the LCWR may be the majority, but that doesn’t mean the majority of sisters in those Orders subscribe to what their ‘management’ espouses.

Perhaps a more accurate description would be that the LCWR represents “the majority of nuns of a certain age”.

I don't know about elderly American nuns 'hating the Mass' but I do know that they object to concelebrations on the ground that the congregation is faced by an exhibition of male 'dominance'. Even Jesuits have been intimadated from concelebrations by these arthritic harridans.

I would love to point out to this sister the experience of one of my confreres, a priest, no conservative, who was studying towards a doctorate in psychology at a prestigious American Catholic university. The program he was on was under the supervision of a nun. She told him to his face that he would not pass because he was a man and a priest! When he complained he was told there was nothing the university could do as she had tenure. So much for the concern of such religious for 'justice'.

I went and actually managed to read the whole article. I guess my stomach has hardened but i still find it difficult to swallow that these sisters insist they are still Catholic. Some of the comments are worth reading too both for the powerful rebuffs from the orthodox and the sad confusion of the heretics.

The Council was not wrong to send religious back to our founding charisms - that is a perennial task. The Capuchins were founded on such a return. The problem was the spirit of the age and the failure to resist the temptation to reread the founder with modern eyes. The result was cherry-picking. Habits out and innovation in. Instead of re-founding and renewal it was demolition and decay. Revenge was had on years of perceived legalism and rigidity by widespread destruction and experimentation. I know of beautiful choirs and oratories destroyed, of priests who hardly ever say Mass, of sisters who construct their own 'community prayer' rather than pray the Divine Office (even that has its own problems) and we could all add to the list. Action was taken too little and too late.

The article brought me back to my years in college (not that long ago) when much of her thinking was widespread. The American Church has had a wide influence well outside the English-speaking world and not always for the good. Generations of priests, religious and laity from all over the world have received a poisoned higher level education there and taken that poison back to their homelands. It is not America's fault. The poison does the rounds, an effect of the Fall, but we do not have to collaborate with it. We need to fight it. Thanks be to God the Vatican is at last acting.